We performed a comparison between Dell XC Appliance [EOL] and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."
"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."
"The solution's hardware is great."
"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."
"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."
"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"Updates need improvement."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
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Dell XC Appliance [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Dell XC Appliance [EOL] writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell XC Appliance [EOL] is most compared with , whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN.
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